As the value and use of information continues to increase, individuals and businesses seek additional ways to process and store information. One option available to users is information handling systems. An information handling system generally processes, compiles, stores, and/or communicates information or data for business, personal, or other purposes thereby allowing users to take advantage of the value of the information. Because technology and information handling needs and requirements vary between different users or applications, information handling systems may also vary regarding what information is handled, how the information is handled, how much information is processed, stored, or communicated, and how quickly and efficiently the information may be processed, stored, or communicated. The variations in information handling systems allow for information handling systems to be general or configured for a specific user or specific use such as financial transaction processing, airline reservations, enterprise data storage, or global communications. In addition, information handling systems may include a variety of hardware and software components that may be configured to process, store, and communicate information and may include one or more computer systems, data storage systems, and networking systems.
Information handling system memory has been mirrored in the past to provide redundant memory for recovery from memory errors. Fault Resilient Memory (FRM) is a type of reserved redundant memory that has been employed in combination with a hypervisor (such as VMware ESXi 5.5 available from VMware, Inc. of Palo Alto, Calif.) that is executing on an information handling system server (such as a Dell PowerEdge 12G server available from Dell Products L.P. of Round Rock, Tex.) to mirror memory channels in Socket 0 so as to introduce fault tolerance and memory reliability. In such applications, FRM is employed in this manner so that the underlying OS/hypervisor can continue running the OS kernel and other critical processes even when an uncorrectable error occurs to the memory that it utilizes. The FRM mirrored portion of the total system memory may also be referred to as the protected reliable memory region.
A conventional FRM protected reliable memory region is statically assigned to be one-fourth of the total system active primary memory. This static calculation is performed by system BIOS when the information handling system boots up with a FRM memory BIOS token set to enable. When the FRM memory region is not fully utilized by the underlying hypervisor or Operating System, system primary memory is wasted. This waste of system primary memory can also adversely affect the performance of virtual machines (workloads) running on the hypervisor when the non-FRM total system memory requirement for these workloads exceeds the non-mirrored portion of the primary memory. As an example, assuming a server has a total system primary memory of 768 GB (each of 24 DIMM slots filled with 32 GB DIMM modules), 192 GB (one-fourth of 768 GB) is conventionally allocated for the protected reliable memory region by the system when the FRM memory BIOS token is enabled. However, in the case of VMware ESXi 5.5, the vmkernel and other default critical processes may not require the entire reserved protected reliable memory region of 192 GB. In such a situation, the remainder of the unused reserved primary memory ranges that are statically assigned by the system BIOS to the protected reliable memory region are wasted.